Radeon 9100 IGP & Mobility Radeon 9100 IGP Platform Preview - Page 1

Published on 23rd Jun 2003, written by Dave Baumann for Consumer Graphics - Last updated: 4th Jul 2007

While NVIDIA have been having much public success with their nForce chipset
series, you may have missed ATI's initial foray into the integrated market.
Radeon IGP340 was released some time ago now, and was met with what appears to
be very little success. As a desktop part, IGP340 was always destined never to
get much in the way of enthusiast support being limited to only a single channel
DDR memory bus. However, where IGP340 failed as a desktop part it had the
opposite effect on the mobile space, capturing 50% of the integrated mobile
sector.

Today, however, ATI are introducing their latest venture into the integrated
chipset market with RS300 and RS300M, otherwise known as Radeon 9100 IGP and
Mobility Radeon 9100 IGP. While ATI are still pitching these firmly as value
oriented parts, they are making attempts to bring the value market up a notch in
terms of system performance, and vastly accelerate integrated graphics
performance in the Intel sector.

ATI sees that there is a problem with the PC industry at the moment, that is
giving rise to a large hole in the market, that ATI term as the "Gaming Ghetto"

Over the past few years the largest growth sector in the PC industry is that
of the Value PC - i.e. the low end PC's that retails for as little a $500. To
meet these low end costs usually the PC's utilise as much integration as
possible, which often means integrated graphics are also utilised such that the
extra costs of a discrete graphics board is not required as well. As evidenced
by Intel's second place in the overall graphics market share, Intel have
obviously been very successful in getting their integrated chipsets into not
only the corporate, but also value PC space.

However, two other factors are weighing in on the PC industry. The first is
that the gaming population is increasing year on year by 20%, meaning that more
people want systems that are capable of playing games acceptably. The other
issue is that as discrete graphics gain performance and feature functionality
they also drive the complexity of games up.

The current offerings of Intel integrated graphics chipsets, even the
recently announced i865 "Springdale" re both limited to DirectX7 and are still
low performance - lower than most gamers are willing to accept. ATI sees this as
an opportunity and are moving into this space with RS300.